


All is Fair (If A Person Makes It So)

by AVMabs



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Chess, Chess Metaphors, F/M, Gen, Morality, i just wanted to examine human nature, this is thin on actual royai
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-09
Updated: 2017-06-09
Packaged: 2018-11-12 04:05:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11153883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AVMabs/pseuds/AVMabs
Summary: Some have said there is no room in conquest for an individual's humanity.If this is the case, if conquest is a set of rules and cold, hard choices, then what is a man to do when he is out of choices, other than surrender?





	All is Fair (If A Person Makes It So)

Roy was only seven, but he knew that he was going to be super good at chess. His sister had told him as much, and he trusted her more than anyone in the world, he thought. He wanted to impress her, so he read all about it first, and now she was about to teach him how to play it properly.

She was sitting opposite him in a red dress, with a finger of whisky in a glass, balancing on her knee. Roy wasn’t old enough for whisky – he’d asked, and Madame had given him a mug of warm milk. 

The chess board was already on the table, set up and ready to go. “Number One,” his sister read. “You have sixteen players: eight pawns, two knights, two rooks, two bishops and…”

“…a King and a Queen, sis.” Roy couldn’t help but interject – he knew it was rude, but he was excited. He knew this.

**

Roy was only 30, and he knew that he was all but finished. The Fuhrer, who he didn’t trust at all, had told him as much. Roy wanted to annoy him, but he hadn’t any reading material at hand.

The Fuhrer was sitting opposite him, ramrod straight, with a white saucer in front of him, on which sat a white teacup. Roy had a cup of his own, and wished he could add a dram of whisky.

“You have… how many players?” The Fuhrer looked relaxed – perfectly relaxed – and Roy knew from the way that his spine was quivering that he was a trembling, pale, sweating mess of skin and sinew, and not nearly enough brain.

Roy swallowed. “One, sir.” 

“Which player is that?” One day, Roy would be able to speak against this man, who wanted nothing but to make Roy speak his agony out loud, and for no other reason than to strike it in Roy’s heart that he knew he was winning.

“The King, sir.” 

“And what does the King do?”

“Nothing.” Not without his queen.

“That’s right, my boy.”

**

“That’s it! Did you read about it before?” Darn! Sis had caught him out! Roy knew he shouldn’t have – that Madame had said that one day his impatience would get him in trouble (“too hasty, Roy-boy”). He hoped it wouldn’t be today.

He had to make sure it wasn’t today. “No…”

“Roy?” Lying felt bad. He didn’t want to lie.

“Yes. But I don’t know anything else, I swear!” It was true! He hadn’t known sis would be teaching him until this afternoon, and Madame was too busy to help him with the words.

“Let’s talk about your queen.”

**

“Let’s talk about your queen.”

“You took her.” It was a simple matter. Fuhrer Bradley had taken his queen. She was his property now. Easier, Roy thought, to speak of these things in terms of transaction, than to think about them as personal losses. Easier, it truly is, to simplify matters to their crudest forms than to acknowledge that in every matter involving a human being, a certain humanity is the natural product. 

Truth itself, however, would no sooner allow Roy than it would allow any other man or woman the relief of the tug of guilt pulling on the tethers between his conscious and his unconscious suddenly loosening its grip and leaving him alone again. 

“It seems you left her unguarded.” Another oversight, because Fuhrer Bradley was not a human being. He produced an inhumanity, and with it, he forced Roy to stare straight at his most vile self. Humanity, with the trimmings of morality, failed to induce this reflection on its own, failed to make a man sick to his stomach with the creeping, grotesque self-truths with which he was faced.

Roy Mustang wished he had never met Fuhrer King Bradley, but well above that, wished he had never been human.

But if he hadn’t any choice in the matter – “It was a risk I was willing to take.” – let him respond like a human.

**

“You need to take risks, Roy – chess is all about risks.” Well, that should be easy. Madame always told him that he took too many risks. She’d said it after he fell out of the tree and broke his arm, and when he tried to get the lemonade down from the top shelf.

“I’ll take plenty. What happens when someone takes your pieces?” He’d been wondering about that for a while – it seemed very strange, that the rules spoke about taking, but not getting back.

“They’re the other person’s pieces, now.”

Well, that wouldn’t do. “How do I win them back?”

**  
“Did you consider the losses when you took that risk? Did you consider the way you could lose your queen?” The Fuhrer was goading him. He needed to remember that. He wouldn’t rise to it – couldn’t rise to it.

“Yes, sir.”

“How cold! You knew you could lose her, yet you maintained your trajectory.” Roy thought of the things he could speak about – Bradley’s Amestris, at war with the countries around it. Bradley’s Amestris, at war with himself. Roy had one piece, yet his playing board was less precarious.

**

“You don’t win them back – that’s not in the rules.” That was stupid. 

“So – does that make them taken, or dead?” Roy supposed, if they were dead, that he couldn’t do anything – but if people had taken them, then he hadn’t lost. 

“One day you’ll learn all about conquest, Roy.” Roy didn’t know what conquest was, and he didn’t care (yet). He just needed to know.

“Yeah, but if they’re just taken, then I can take them back.”

“Do you think you would, even though the rules say you can’t?” Sis always asked weird questions like this. She said, once, that it was because he had an enquiring  
mind. He didn’t know what that was, either.

“Yes.”

**

There was one brutal fact that Fuhrer Bradley could not comprehend. No single analogy could reflect life: Roy’s queen was not a playing piece, but a piece who was playing. 

Humanity might have been composed of guilt and apathy, but no living thing – as an individual or a collective – survived through guilt and apathy. 

For, under all that guilt, there was something incomprehensible that prevailed, even when all else was stripped away. Roy Mustang, being a scientist, called it activation energy. Truth, of course knew that it was love, and for Truth there was no greater pleasure than considering the dear cost of that understanding.


End file.
